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by Günday, Hakan; Beler, Zeynep;

  Rastin immediately figured out the contraption and gave it a try. “Gaza? You are hear me?”

  “Yes, Rastin … have you picked someone?”

  “Group not understand. Why is danger?”

  “I can only say that to whomever it is you pick. You’ll also know, of course. Because you’ll be translating. We shouldn’t scare the others unnecessarily, right?”

  As soon as Rastin related this to those around him, there was a rippling in the reservoir. Everyone started to talk at once. They could neither hear nor understand one another. I could see it. I didn’t have to know Pashto to recognize desperation and fear. Especially with a dark secret in question that concerned all their futures, it had taken panic only a few seconds to fill up the reservoir like poisonous gas. This was because of the circumstances they were in, of course. They were in such an illegal and illogical situation that they reacted much more rashly than a people passing their lives between home, work, and school. They were after all on a journey that trapped them between the place they came from and the place they were heading to. They’d left everything behind that they could afford to lose and the only thing they had left was their bodies. Their only valuable was themselves. And in that situation neither conventional ethical norms nor logical decision-making devices were valid. When a person’s only wish was to make it from one point to another, no matter what, every psychological and social theory caved.

  For example, their fears were thousands of times that of the apprehensions of the regular people of a regular country. That enabled me to reap the reaction of every one of my moves instantly. Last year, when I was yet a student, I’d been sent to the fast chess tournament in the city because I was school champion. We had only three seconds for every move. I’d made it to the finals. A private schooler had sat across from me and kept turning around to look at his father throughout the whole game. The man was at least as excited as his son. I don’t know why, but I let the kid win. Then the man came up and embraced his son. Maybe it was only for the sake of seeing that … whatever. So due to the fast reactions of the reservoir dwellers, I was once again chasing three-second moves.

  And a woman in her forties with a child of seven or eight in her lap, that I hadn’t noticed up till then, shouted at the top of her lungs and shut everybody up. Then she pointed to Rastin and said something. Most probably she wanted him to speak. That was what Rastin did and he did so for about five minutes. Then he stopped and gestured at the old man. At this, from different spots in the reservoir, ten hands that I could count went up. The election had begun!

  The middle-aged man sitting next to the elderly man, whom I took to be his son due to the fact that they had agreed to shit in the same bucket, counted the hands. Then he said something to Rastin. Rastin pointed at himself and expelled a long sentence before he was silent. At that twenty-one hands were raised in the reservoir. Since the only child in the reservoir wasn’t yet of voting age, his hand had gone up to be grabbed by his mother and pulled down. The elderly man had motionlessly stared ahead of him in both votes, but Rastin had had no qualms about raising his hand for himself. I’ve always found it unbecoming for a person to vote for himself. It’s one of the two most repulsive things in the world. The other is a Hindu playing cricket.

  “Gaza! Are you hear?”

  Rastin was calling to the camera. I had started to say, “Yes, Rastin,” when the Afghani sitting next to the elderly man suddenly stood and started to yell. Now I was certain he was his son! It wasn’t hard to guess who he was yelling at. He was clearly yelling at the owners of the twenty-one hands that had gone up a minute ago. He was even unable to control himself at one point and tried to attack Rastin, but the others intervened. But other champions of the old man had come to life. Of course, the ones who had been regular people up until the point they morphed into Rastin’s crowd a minute ago had also straightened up. In a matter of seconds, a weird fight had erupted in the reservoir where you couldn’t tell who was laying into whom. It was weird because the election didn’t even have an actual topic. They didn’t even know what purpose the chosen one would serve. That left someone they had chosen for reasons they didn’t know. But there were others who were enraged out of nowhere at that someone because the candidate they had supported hadn’t been chosen. They were going through the first phases of democracy. They believed in the vote, but didn’t trust the result unless their candidate came on top. Then that woman in her forties, once again, shoved the child off her lap and unleashed a keening scream that ruptured every eardrum in the reservoir, and all was calm even if only for a short while.

  The woman had this specialty. First she let out a shock-factor scream, and then she would start to cry. Her voice fell to pieces as she cried, and she would dissolve into sobs by the time she sat down. It was a sufficiently functional technique. For she had a sacred accessory: the child. The child that she shoved away when she got up to stand, that she grabbed by the arm and pulled in as she sat down, and then tipped over to press into her chest. But as all this was going down, the child never took his hand out of his mouth and merely watched his mother. He was like some kind of taxidermy. Maybe he was a midget pretending to be a child. Maybe he was her husband and not a midget pretending to be a child, I don’t even know. You couldn’t really tell from where I was sitting … I wasn’t interested in the details.

  The only thing that concerned me about the images I was seeing on the six cameras, on my screen divided into six, was that the peace they’d had up until a half hour ago had been fucked over by politics. Politics was like a foreign substance in one’s body, after all. It was as synthetic as a platinum rod. It was the biggest obstacle in the way of the natural progress of society’s division of labor. It was against human nature. But then humanity itself was against nature. So there wasn’t much to do about that.

  Rastin, upon seeing that the objections against the election results had dissolved into silence, looked up at the camera across from him. What had happened had no importance for the old man, but judging from the looks in the eyes of the ones around him, it was evident they would never forgive Rastin. Rastin couldn’t even look at the camera for more than the three seconds it would take to speak, kept casting nervous glances at the spot the opposing side was congregating in for fear of an ambush. When he saw that opposition was limited to hasty mumbles and the shaking of heads, he finally relaxed and spoke.

  “OK, Gaza. I, leader … tell … what is danger?”

  “Now, Rastin, the ones with you can’t hear what I’m about to tell you. I’ll explain first, we’ll come up with a solution, then we’ll see. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “It seems the ones taking you into Greece want more money. Apparently there’s more policing on the sea, you understand? More risk, and because of that, more money!”

  “But we, we give money, in Kabul. They say, okay.”

  “I know. But it looks like you have to pay more.”

  “No, Gaza. No money.”

  His constant use of my name was starting to get on my nerves. Why, I don’t know.

  “You’re sure no one has any money?”

  “Sure! They tell us, do not take money to road. It is better.”

  “All right then, here’s what you can do. You’re thirty-three people now. You paid $8,000 per person, right? Now they want $2,000 more from you. So in total you have to pay $10,000 for each. That leaves a shortage of $66,000. Say you negotiate out of the sixty-six thousand but the rest is still fare for six people. So what you paid at this point is only enough for twenty-seven people. So only twenty-seven people get to continue on the way. So above everything else you’d have to pick the six who stay behind. You have to, really. Because if you tell them all this, there’s sure to be a scene. But if you tell me who stays behind, we’ll tell them that they’ll take the next boat after you people leave, and then send them back to Afghanistan. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  I was sure Rastin understood me very well. I kne
w from the many Afghani students that had passed through the reservoir that Kabul University had a department of Turkish Language and Literature. No matter what department they had studied in, in general they would have dabbled in Turkish classes. At the very least they’d know a few words. But Rastin’s Turkish surpassed them all. It was possible he had come to Turkey before, maybe even lived here. But that wasn’t in my area of interest. I wasn’t interested in anyone’s background aside from myself. I was fifteen and clearly the world revolved around me. Like a housefly! And if it continued to revolve that was only because I didn’t crush it in my fist!

  “I not understand! Gaza?”

  Rastin was trying to appear to have forgotten Turkish in four seconds, but the sweat on his brow, glistening under the strong light of the reservoir, told me he wasn’t doing a very good job.

  “You’re to choose six people. They’re to stay here and then go back to Afghanistan. Or you’ll pay $66,000. Do you get it now?”

  “Yes,” said Rastin. But he was about to cry.

  “Can’t you pay two thousand per person?”

  “No, no, too much money. No one have money. Not other way?”

  “Actually maybe … you can also do this. I don’t know how these guys do business. They’ll take a kidney too. One of those cost around twenty thousand. So if you choose three people, you can take care of this thing with three kidneys.”

  Rastin’s eyes, growing wider with every word, had almost come to overflowing the broken frame of his glasses.

  “A minute! A minute! What is kidney?”

  “You don’t know what it means? Should I check a dictionary and tell you the English or something?”

  “I knows, I knows, kidney! But, Gaza! No!”

  “Fine, then the last solution I can find is this: give the guys two women, you carry on. But you have to give them those younger ones. Not the one with the kid.”

  It wouldn’t have surprised me if Rastin passed out then.

  “Is not possible! Is not possible! No!”

  “Then I’ll go tell my father. You’re all going back. Okay?”

  “Gaza! Gaza!”

  “Yes, Rastin?”

  “I give. One kidney enough?”

  Had he really said this? Would he be that selfless? For a group of people, one-third of which would have torn him to pieces, no less! I had to make a move in three seconds. With those words the chessboard had suddenly taken flight, grown to the size of the shed’s ceiling, and come crashing down on my head. But I wasn’t dead yet!

  “Okay! One kidney from you. But we need two more.”

  Breathless from his sudden display of heroics, Rastin was left under the scrutiny of the reservoir dwellers. Well aware that our discussion concerned them closely, they listened as hard as they could in hopes of catching familiar words in the dialogue whizzing back and forth over their heads. But they understood nothing, and because of this their patience was melting like soap. The son of the old man couldn’t take it any longer and began to talk. Surely he wanted to know what I was saying. But Gaza must be saying something like, “Wait a minute, I’ll tell you later!” The man who felt like his whole family tree had been insulted because his father wasn’t chosen for leader of the reservoir wanted some answers. Now! I was going to provide him with the facts he wanted. It wasn’t going to be in Pashto.

  “Rastin, listen to me.”

  Rastin, now trying to ward off the guy with a hand on his chest, who had now come up to him and was elaborately jawing into his ear, was saying, “Tell, Gaza!”

  “I’m going to open the lid now. I’m going to toss in a key. In the partition in the back, on the wall, there’s a ring with a lock. Open the ring with the key, then put it over the guy’s wrist and lock it.”

  Still trying to fend off the man, Rastin shouted over the voices that were once again talking over one another, “Not necessary!”

  “If you say so …”

  My attempt at sending the first inmate to the cell I’d built specially for the reservoir state was thwarted. Rastin, taking account of both the man and the others around him, must be saying that for now, everyone should keep calm and that an important issue was being discussed. But the old man’s son was talking without pausing for breath, as if he was reciting a story by heart. Without a single halt. But then Rastin said something that caused him to stop and freeze with his mouth open as though his final sentence was lodged there. Rastin said a few more words and the reservoir stilled entirely! He must be relating the kidney business. The $66,000 shortage! If it had been me I couldn’t even have held out for so long. I’d have blabbed right away. But Rastin was cut from the cloth of a leader. He knew about crisis management! When he was finished, the man quietly went to sit down beside his father. And Rastin, looking up at the nearest camera, said, “Okay! No problem.”

  “Did you tell them everything?”

  “No.”

  “So how’d that guy shut up?”

  “I say, boy father dead. Boy, I say, crazy! We are trap here! I talk to boy, I say, I save us. Understands?”

  Now, I hadn’t expected that. Rastin wasn’t only a leader but a true lawyer! I had no idea if he had graduated, but he definitely didn’t need a diploma. For making up a story about my father being dead and their being locked up inside a reservoir at the mercy of a crazy boy within those mere seconds would have been harder than writing a complete dissertation on Roman Law!

  “Gaza?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t open door!”

  “Okay!”

  “You are open door, they attack!”

  “Okay, Rastin.”

  “Now sing …”

  “What?”

  “A melody!”

  “What?”

  “Song! Song!”

  “Song?”

  “You crazy! For be crazy!”

  I laughed. There was a calendar on the wall facing me. On it, the ten stanzas of Mehmet Akif Ersoy. The Independence March3 was a song after all! I began to sing. In that moment the tens of faces on the screen turned in my direction. Thirty-two people, including the old man, looked at the cameras, and I really did feel like a crazy person. I believed that I was crazy at least as much as they did. Only Rastin among them didn’t think this. That was why he was the only one not looking up at the cameras. Dragging his left foot back and forth through the sawdust on the ground, he was probably pondering over who would provide the two other kidneys. When I finished singing the second stanza of the march, Rastin murmured something. It was a short sentence. Maybe only a word. And they all began to applaud me! We really were a democracy now. The leader thought himself to lead through the lies he told, the people believed the laws it deferred to really existed for its own good, and all the radio announcer could do as the sole news media of the country was pretend to be crazy.

  I didn’t talk to Rastin again that day. I only watched. One by one he visited the small groups clustered at various corners of the reservoir and talked to each of them. Then at some point he got up and approached one of the cameras and said, “Gaza?” four times over. I didn’t answer. He hung his head and retreated. He was so overwhelmed by responsibility that he sank down into the first available spot and went to sleep. Or pretended to sleep so no one would bother him. The others were probably trying to figure out a way to escape from the hole they thought themselves to be imprisoned in. The women wept. The old man and his companions stared ahead silently, while the others submerged themselves in the rise and fall of deliberation. Meanwhile the sole child in the reservoir hummed the melody of the Independence March from the remnants stuck in his head.

  First thing next day, I took my place at my table and turned on the microphone.

  “Rastin!”

  Rastin, long desperate for the sound of my voice, stood up immediately and said, “Yes?” The others looked up at the cameras and smiled in hopes of endearing themselves to the boy who held their fate in his hands.

  “So this is what we’re going to
do: my father has talked with the guys. It looks like one kidney is enough. So there’s no need for you to arrange two more. It’s been taken care of. I don’t know where they’ll perform the operation, but it’s probably somewhere in Greece. I think it’s okay for you to tell the others now. You can tell them I fooled you by saying my father was dead … I’m going to talk a bit more now and pretend I’m telling you what I told you yesterday, and you can pretend it’s the first you’ve heard about this sixty-six thousand business … all right? I’m going to keep talking … but you ask me some questions too.”

  But Rastin said nothing. He only looked at the camera. There was a crack in the right side of his glasses. I hadn’t noticed it before. Maybe it had happened during the night. The glass hadn’t been able to withstand the exhaustion coming off his eyes and had cracked. Or it had happened during one of the fights of the day before. As I was contemplating all this, Rastin turned around and walked away. He sat back down in the spot he had been sitting. The first wave of the day shook the reservoir afresh, and everyone fell on top of him. They had him surrounded, and the world’s most dissident chorale was abusing his ears when Rastin cried out in a tone of voice I had never heard up till then. I had no idea what he was doing. Not just me, the others had no idea, either. Rastin had let out such a cry that it had put an end to that horrible concert in its first curtain. Then Rastin shut his eyes and put his head between his hands. The ones around him slowly backed away and retreated to their spots. I still couldn’t tell what he was trying to do.

  “Rastin!” I called, but he didn’t raise his head.

  That day, although I attempted to talk countless times, Rastin wouldn’t answer. When the others brought out their rations to eat, he wouldn’t accept anything that was offered to him. He merely observed those around him. The people surrounding him. The eating, talking, pacing, praying people. He would have given his kidney so they could make it to where they were going. Perhaps Rastin imagined every bite that went into their mouths as morsels of his kidney … Is it worth it, he must have been wondering. The leader contemplated his people and asked: is it worth it for these people?